


what happened at the snow queen's palace and what happened afterwards

by firstaudrina



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Hotel
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Donovan/Ramona is more of a secondary pairing, Drug Use, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 06:49:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5698972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Donovan had one lover and she lived in his veins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what happened at the snow queen's palace and what happened afterwards

It was like a baby duck imprinting on its mother: she was the first thing Donovan saw when he opened his eyes. He was the little boy in _The Snow Queen_ all grown up, snatched willingly from his mother by a woman carved from ice.

He had gone to bed with a needle in his arm, his body unwashed and unshaved, clad in thrifted denim and stolen flannel. If asked, he would not have been able to remember the last time he looked in the mirror or even what he thought of the person he would have found there. Donovan had one lover and she lived inside his veins. 

When he woke up, he was clean. It was like he had been prepared, a human sacrifice, his skin buffed and hair brushed. He was lying naked under a silken silver sheet on her round bed, on his back with his arms at his sides. She was waiting, and when he opened his eyes, she smiled.

Donovan had one lover. 

 

 

He met Sally at a concert. Dumb and human and jonesing, he'd been scratching at the insides of his arms and asking around for anyone, anything, isn't there something he could shoot inside himself? Sally was a magnet. All the way across the room, Donovan found her eyes waiting, rimmed in sooty black and wet from crying. Their eyes met and Sally smiled. 

"You're beautiful," she told him first thing, but Donovan had heard a lot of that in his life and it didn't mean anything anymore. He didn't look as good since he'd been using, anyway.

"You holding?" he asked her first thing, and Sally dimmed a little. She'd heard a lot of that too.

Sally always administered herself and she liked to fool around during. Donovan didn't care. She ran her bruised plum mouth all over his neck while he held his arm out, waiting and waiting, and eventually she put the needle in him. Donovan moaned when she pressed down on the plunger and he kissed Sally right on the mouth, which made her burnt smile blossom at the edge of his vision. 

"I've got better stuff than this," Sally told him. "I know a place where we can go."

 

 

"Would you like to look in the mirror?"

But Donovan was looking at her. When he woke up, he did not take stock of his surroundings or his own body; that would come later, learning the new flawless elasticity of his skin, the joints that rarely felt pain, scratches that could heal in an hour. When he woke up, he was only looking at her.

She was very still, watching him with unreadable eyes, unremarkably hazel under glossy lids but hypnotic, somehow. Her hair was long, white blonde, only slightly cooler in tone than her white skin, and it made her unreal. A movie star, maybe a singer. She was too luxurious to be anything else, opulent even just sitting there. Her hair was long and loose, and she only wore a robe of heavy red satin, voluminous enough to trail on the cold gray floor. Her nails were very long, filed to points. 

Donovan wondered if he would die here.

"No," he answered finally, his voice surprisingly strident and firm. "Who are you?"

Her mouth moved in a way that might have indicated a smile on anyone else. "Where am I," she offered, mockingly. "What do you want with me?"

She slid out of her seat and made her way to him. Her heels made quiet and distinct clicks, each step measured and secure. When she reached the bed, she crawled onto it on her hands and knees, not submissive but like a cat, slinky and predatory. Her robe slipped open, revealing a bodysuit of glittering silver. She pushed on Donovan's chest until he lay flat and then she crawled over him too. She bent until her lips, soft and pink, hovered over his.

She asked, "Don't you care where you are?"

But that was something Donovan knew. "I'm with you." 

Something in her expression shifted, opened up. "You can call me the Countess."

Strangely, against all odds, Donovan felt himself smile. "Is there a short version of that?"

 

 

Ramona didn't understand.

Ramona thought she understood, but she couldn't possibly; Donovan was the only one who knew, the only one. Ramona spent twenty years by her side looking for a way out. Donovan spent twenty years never looking anywhere else.

"You sure are a _sad_ little boy," Ramona snarled. Her contempt was at odds with her easy sprawl, legs thrown over the side of the leather chair in her foyer. "You just want to lick her boots for eternity." 

"When push comes to shove, I don't see you getting much done either," Donovan countered. "Bartholomew, the children – the Countess. Nobody's suffered as much as a scratch."

She got to her feet quick, her body one long line of threat. "Maybe if I had a partner who was worth shit."

Donovan gave her a careless shrug, a smile. "All you got is me."

Ramona looked him up and down, lip curling and eyes lingering. "Wish I'd kept the receipt." 

Ramona didn't understand. She couldn't.

 

 

Donovan spent the first two weeks of his immortal life in the Countess' bed. By the time he left her room he was shocked to find he was still inside the Hotel Cortez. Donovan was remade, and not just in tailored suits and perfect skin; it was the first time in his life he had purpose, straight and true as an arrow to the heart. It was a strange and exhilarating thing to be useful, to have use. 

He couldn't remember the taste of her blood splattering over his lips the first time, but there were enough times after to make up for it. She drew the sharp points of her black nails over her ribs, back arching, and left thin rivulets of blood in their wake. Donovan affixed his mouth to each in turn, chasing the burn of her blood, the whiskey and cherry of it. He kissed her fingers and her breasts and her cunt, there was not a part of her body he did not bend his head in service to.

He began to live for the feeling of her scratching through his hair.

"I was born far from here," she told him. "I came here like you, to be young and beautiful for the cameras."

"I could barely land a commercial." He moved blunt teeth over her thigh, her knee, her calf.

"Me either," she laughed, and it was a gift: her first hint of vulnerability. "Well, in a manner of speaking; they didn't make commercials then. But I looked very fetching standing behind some rather artistic scenery on movie sets."

"I bet." Donovan sank his teeth gently into her ankle. 

"I was infected by a very beautiful man, like you," she said. "And I lost him. He left me."

At that, Donovan surged up to kiss her so hard he could have tasted blood in it. "I'll never leave you," he swore.

"Oh, baby," she sighed. "That's what they all say."

 

 

" _Useless_ ," Ramona seethed, "Goddamn _spineless_ , goddamn _waste_ of a _man_."

Another attempt had left no one dead, and the farce of it was wearing thin on everyone involved. Ramona pushed him hard against the white marble of her palatial home, the inverse of the Countess' castle, the darkness of the Hotel Cortez. Donovan allowed Ramona to shove him, to bruise him, to hurt him; he missed it.

"You're a lot of sound and fury, Ramona," he said, head tipped back to bear the line of his throat. "What was it that signified?"

Ramona slapped him hard, the quick sharp bite of it turning to tingling, overflowing heat. She slapped him once on either cheek and Donovan kept the backs of his wrists pinned to the wall by willpower and nothing else. She hit him and then she kissed him, which Donovan had been counting on. He'd wanted Ramona like this from almost the first minute, but it would be good, too, in the long run to have done this now.

The Countess kissed like a tease and then a killing; Ramona kissed like a forest fire. She dragged her hands down his chest until the buttons of his shirt split from their bindings, then she dragged her nails back up until his skin burned. He grabbed her by the hips and moaned, let his mouth open for her, go slack for her. 

"Too bad I always had a weakness for a beautiful man," she muttered, then pushed hard on his shoulders so he'd buckle to his knees. Donovan looked up at her, grinning. 

He rolled her skirt up and tested the skin of her thighs with his teeth. He wanted her to come before she fucked him. "That's what they all say." 

He still had Ramona's scent on him, her lipstick and saliva and slickness, when he went back to the Hotel. He took the elevator all the way up, and when he found the Countess there, he said, "Let's make a deal."

 

 

How exactly did she determine when his time was up?

That was what Donovan wanted to know, just what went into that decision, what made her grow bored with him, dispose of him like a body down the laundry chute. He came to recognize the exact moment it happened, later: it was before Tristan, and Donovan was on the couch with her above him. She ran her fingers over his face, gripped his chin and drank him in with her eyes, and if he'd been smart, he'd have known right then it was over. But he didn't know why.

Twenty years brought with it a lot of ups and downs, and Donovan had watched her fade before. She always came back. He was always able to ignite the fire, make her burn again. Maybe he would have been able to if it hadn't been for Tristan. Tristan, who didn't even love her. Not like Donovan did. His love was singular.

"What was it like, when you made me?" he asked that very first day, when he was new and everything was still beautiful. He never could remember it.

"My love," she said, and licked at his lips, "It was like drinking in the very light of God."

When she kicked him out, he had reminded her of that – and she _laughed_. She laughed at him like he was a one night stand that got too clingy and not her lover, her beloved, her everything for two decades. The pink neon light was in her white hair, and her face looked young – younger than his.

Desperate, he pleaded, "Elizabeth."

Her expression shuttered and, without another word, she slammed the bedroom doors. Just like that, they were severed. 

 

 

Revenge didn't taste like much when all was said and done, so Donovan could think of no sweeter thing than this: a final smoke, a last drink, one more look at her, and death. He imagines her rage, the metallic claws of her glove ripping his throat open. He imagines her playing him, making his death last, dragging the silver pain on for hours. But the way it happened was better than any of his visions: her tears, a spray of bullets, his life for hers. It was the best way to die. It made him more hers than ever.

Donovan had one lover and she lived in his veins.


End file.
